Category: Spring 2011 Kaleidoscope

This week I’d like to talk about what I’d like to call “The completely disgusting comedy block”. They air right after each other, they’re only ten minutes long and I’d run out of time to talk about the other series this season if I did both of them in a separate post. First of all, Hen Zemi.

The TV-series of Hen Zemi is not as good as the OVA. At first I thought that, if this were to happen, it’d ruin the entire series, but surprisingly it’s still worth watching. It did lead to bizarre situations as the previous episode, which… was entirely censored because of how much nudity was in it. It wasn’t just filled with black screens: it seemed like the animators outright refused to draw any of the explicit stuff.

The biggest downside of the TV-series though is that the dialogue just isn’t as good. The characterization in the OVA was so detailed and dynamic that it really got under my skin. The TV-series mainly is about the antics of a bunch of perverts, nothing more, nothing less. Whereas the OVA would go into great detail about breast sizes, this show just keeps making small boob jokes. That kind of stuff.

The characterization still is good though, and surprisingly enjoyable considering how this is a fanservice show. This episode for example was quite down to earth and actually added quite a bit to the cast of characters. Especially that mother who just keeps interrupting was hilarious, especially with that smirk on her face. The dialogue still is based around people talking to each other, and for what it does, it does this well.

As for Yondemasuyo Azazel-san: I love Tsutomu Mizushima as a director, but he’s not perfect. He is undoubtedly the king of extreme comedy: His series always have the most extreme overreactions and a sense of energy that I haven’t been able to find somewhere else. The big danger is this turning into a gimmick, though. The best example of that are Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-Chan and Dai Mahou Touge: they’re both series that look like cute mahou shoujo, yet instead have a completely brutal and badass main character instead. The big problem with those two shows was that whey were only funny for one episode when they still had their shock value, and became completely tedious afterwards. That was my biggest fear for Azazel-San.

This fifth episode however showed that Azazel-San has enough material to remain hilarious. On top of taking comedic facial distortions to another level, it also has a lot of fun messing with demon summonings and uninspired episodic stories by subverting the hell out of them. The comedic timing in this episode in particular was excellent, but the jokes were also quite creative. I love how the ultimate weapon that any demon can have is simply violence

Apart from being ridiculously over the top I also love these small touches like Azazel continuously ranting and laughing in the background, or how the whole setting is based on something really risky (like how this episode showed what would happen when a summoning goes wrong).

Overall, this is a pretty nice season for comedies. There is nothing side splittingly funny, and yet there are quite a few inspired, well written and well paced series that are quite funny to watch. All of the series however lack something that really places them amongst the great comedies.
Rating: * (Good) (Hen Zemi) / ** (Excellent) (Azazel-San)

Ooh, Moshidora, what are you doing to me? As if I wasn’t busy enough already…

On a serious note though: we really need more of these kinds of series, who don’t care about airing weekly for 13 or 26 weeks, and instead just create their own schedule. The big problem with anime in general is that it’s just so damn inflexible, and it’s the series like this and Supernatural that really show that there are many different ways to release your series.

Moshidora overall impressed me, because of how much time it spent taking an in-depth look at the baseball team in question. With just three episodes, and Druker’s book was used well in order to help understand these players and get them to perform better. This episode continues on that trend, and takes a look at motivation, introducing a competitive element in the training. They’re all quite nice ideas here. I also like that for once, we get to take a look at a baseball team that isn’t fully committed, and where making a mistake is more the norm than the exception.

This series’ biggest problem is its cheese. Whenever this show gets too dramatic, it just loses my suspense of disbelief because it just overexaggerates things too much, and the acting just isn’t good enough to make these scenes believable. This episode spend a lot of time on this one guy who kept ditching trainings because of a mistake he made. That on its own is very believable: I’ve had this many times myself with my Karate practices. But when he angsted he acted just like his dog died. The way he reacts just isn’t believable. The cheesy violin background music did not help.

Also, what was up with that ending of this episode?
Rating: * (Good)

I know that I praised this series and all, but as I watched the second episode of A-Channel something dawned on me: this series is really formulaic, isn’t it? This was less prevalent in this third episode, but still it stands out.

I’m not talking about formulaic in terms of cliches. These are actually fine in this series, especially compared to the other series of this season. Instead, the scenes in this series nearly always follow the same pattern:
– First there is a bit of a build-up: characters do something normally.
– A character then does something weird, random or strange.
– A straight man then makes a startled reaction.

And mind you, these scenes are often less than a minute long, and this same pattern just repeats over and over. The girls do alternate between acting as the straight man and the one making the joke, but most of the time they have fixed roles in these jokes. Especially in the second episode.

This is a very nasty flaw, and yet this was one of the few moe shows this season that did not bore me out of my skull. Sure, the second episode was bad, but this third episode actually started to mix things up a bit, and contained some actual good jokes along the way, something that a lot of other generic moe shows this season lacked.

It’s nothing amazing, but my best guess at what makes this series tick is that it has good characters. Looking back to the joke format above: that format may be bad, but the build-up is actually fleshing these characters out pretty nicely. The jokes themselves meanwhile, even when they fail, do not turn these characters into generic stereotypes, or force them into these contrived situations, but instead they play with their quirks.

There are some bad examples though, at which this show forgets this. This episode for example contained a really strange insert-song that was just there to fill up time, and the sole salvation of that school doctor was his shock factor, which will die out in a few episodes now. There are also times at which the characters just fall too much into their own roles, but thankfully moments like these are made up for by other scenes that do something completely different with the character in question.

That variety will probably be key in keeping this series fresh. This episode was a good example of that, because it did a good job of shuffling its scenes around, showing a lot of different aspects of high school life. Currently it’s probably at the bare minimum of not being annoying. It’s obviously nothing amazing like Hana-Saku Iroha or Anohana, but it suffices for now as something laid-back to watch.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

For those who only stumbled upon this blog recently, in the category Spring 2011 Kaleidoscope I review an episode of a different series each week. There are quite a number of series that I don’t want to blog weekly (like this one), but have enough to say about to fill one post. At the end of the season when I’ve run out of shows to review, I return to the best ones for some final impressions. I don’t do these Kaleidoscopes every single season (the previous Winter Season was just too small for it), but I found it a nice way to show a lot about the busy seasons.

In any case, manga adaptations have always been tricky, but Sket Dance actually has a clearly paved road to a very enjoyable series. Since the manga consists out of just random stories, if the creators are smart they can just compile the best chapters of the manga together and make a very enjoyable series. This is one of those cases where I’d really encourage shuffling around the chapters in order to make them paint a nice picture of its cast. The most important for Sket Dance will be bringing its school to life. Its premise really lends itself to showing many different people walking around the school grounds. Unfortunately, I haven’t read the manga, so I can’t really comment on whether or not this episode took these liberties, or whether it’s just a textbook adaptation.

In any case though, this episode served its purpose: it built up momentum. It perhaps wasn’t the best in terms of characterization, but it did have a lot of energy that it used really well. This episode was pretty much an entire fest of ADHD that was surprisingly enjoyable. What this series needs to do now is keep building further upon this momentum. If not, then this will just revolve into a scream-fest.

Because yeah, this show is pretty simple. Right now the characters are constantly screaming: if there is no order to that chaos then it will get boring pretty fast. The biggest problem right now is that all of the people that the Sket Dan needs to help are stereotypes and one-sided. Currently, they’re being saved by 1) one big twist to their characters, 2) the fast pacing of this show and 3) having them reappear throughout the other chapters. Take for example The World God Only Knows: that one lacks numbers 2 and 3 and as a result, none of these characters really end up standing out. (as a matter of fact, I’ve pretty much forgotten about most of them). Sket Dance needs to avoid this by making all of these people count, despite their short arcs. Right now though, I’d say that if it can keep up this pace, it’ll turn out fine. but it’s obviously not going to be anything amazing.
Rating: * (Good)

In this Spring 2011 Kaleidoscope, I’ll be blogging a different series each week. For me, a week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday, so for this first week I could only choose between Dog Days and Nichijou. Now, I really don’t like Dog Days (it’s not the premise; it’s the half-assed execution that gets me), I figured that this would be a good chance to wrap up my thoughts on the tons of slice of life series this season. In technical terms, Nichijou again has the most solid execution, but I’m probably going to drop it after this episode.

The thing is that I love slice of life… as long as I care about the characters. If not, they they bore me beyond belief, and unfortunately after three episodes (the OVA included), I’m still missing this with Nichijou. There are several reasons for this, but there are two that really stand out for me:

First of all: it tries to be funny, while it actually isn’t and I really don’t like people making jokes that just aren’t funny. Sure, this episode had some laughs, but they’re just too few and far inbetween. This series also has the tendency to make a joke, then instead of just wrapping it up, dragging it further for way too long in the hopes of squeezing some extra laughs out of it. Take a look at Hen Zemi and Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san: those are two series that actually figured out that you don’t necessarily need to take up 20 minute episodes. I think that that would also have fitted Nichijou. It would have really tightened up the pacing.

The second reason: who are these characters? What exactly do we know about them? I mean, the whole point of slice of life is to show the everyday activities of its characters without the usual forced drama or unrealistic action plot: just show some ordinary people living their daily lives. However, it’s not like ordinary people are completely bland either. Everyone still needs to have at least some background, but even there this show just refuses to show even the slightest hints at characterization. All we know right now is that the lead character has a sister and the professor made herself a robot.

It’s the same problem I had with Lucky Star: these characters are simply way too one-dimensional and one-sided. K-On at least bothered to make its cast feel like regular high school girls. These two however don’t even bother.

Where this show stands above Lucky Star (and really miles above), is with its animation and creativity. Especially the running scene in this episode was excellent. It’s the scenes like that that are the big selling point of this series. At this point though, I don’t think that it’ll be enough for this series: there are just too many other scenes that just don’t work.
Rating: (Enjoyable)